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WAKE FOREST, N.C. -- Barack Obama hardly marched across the South like Sherman. But he certainly made some inroads.
The Illinois Democrat failed to win a majority of white votes in any Southern state, and exit polls indicate that a deeper racial divide may persist here than in other regions.
But he won Florida. You could argue that Florida -- with its snowbirds and ice hockey franchises -- is not really "Southern," but that doesn't change the fact that a Northern liberal Democrat hadn't taken the state since FDR.
And it's hard to overstate the symbolic importance of Obama's comfortable victory in Virginia, once the capital of the Confederacy. No Democrat had won the Old Dominion since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
"Old Virginny is dead," declared Gov. Tim Kaine, who helped guide Obama to victory.
Even North Carolina, which has been reliably Republican in presidential politics since 1980, is still too close to call. And though Georgia chose Republican John McCain, Obama was more competitive in that Deep South state than any Democrat since Bill Clinton, who won it in 1992 and narrowly lost it in 1996.
"Look. Al Gore couldn't win any Southern state," said Jeremy Mayer, a political scientist at George Mason University and author of the book Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960-2000. "A Northern black man did better in Southern states than Al Gore, a child of the South."
"It is a new day," real estate broker Sibrina Roberts, who is black, declared as she emerged from a Wake Forest polling place Tuesday after casting her vote for Obama.
Jimmy Carter won every Southern state but Virginia on his way to the White House in 1976, and Clinton had Southern support in his back-to-back election victories.
But both were Southern whites who could appeal to moderates.
Obama never thought he could sweep the "solid" Republican South. Like Clinton before him, he knew his best hope was to split the region.
In 1992, Clinton focused on his home state of Arkansas and running mate Gore's Tennessee, along with Florida, Georgia and Louisiana. Clinton took most of those states in both elections.
Obama essentially used the same strategy but targeted different states: Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, all of which had two things going for them: large African-American populations and large numbers of "white migrants" from more Democrat-leaning states.
Of course, not all of these blue-state transplants voted for Obama.
Engineer Keith Hawkes moved from Obama running mate Joe Biden's home state of Delaware to Lynchburg, Va., thinking the economy there might be stronger. A year later, he's still looking for a job.
Hawkes, 64, said he voted for McCain because he thought the Republican would be better for the economy and would do more to protect his Social Security. But the white man said race was also a factor.
"I personally just wasn't ready for a black man to lead the country," he said.
Exit polling shows that though whites in the rest of the nation leaned toward McCain by a hair, two-thirds of Southern whites backed the Arizona senator. The deeper South the state, the more overwhelming McCain's victory among whites -- even young whites.
In 1964, blacks accounted for 5.8 million of the 32.4 million voting-age Southerners, according to the Census Bureau. And fewer than half of black Southerners cast ballots that year.
But in state after state across the region this campaign, new registrations among African-Americans have far outstripped white numbers.
Still, it's safe to say that Obama didn't start a revolution in Dixie. In Alabama and Mississippi, just one in 10 whites voted for him, and the figure was only slightly higher in Louisiana.
"The solid South has been cracked," said Mayer, "but it ain't over."
